Jomolhari

Adobe InDesign CS3 & CS4

Note: There is now a special version of this font called Jomolhari ID available which was designed to work only in Adobe's in Adobe's InDesign (CS3 & CS4) on both Windows and Mac. InDesign has its own OpenType shaping engine which currently does not have specific support for Tibetan script.
The font works by using lookups under "generic" OpenType features which are applied by InDesign's shaping engine ~ rather than the features specified for Tibetan which InDesign's shaping engine does not apply. This also enables the font to work in a number of Macintosh applications.

TCC: Tibetan Machine Uni

The fonts of Tibetan Computer Company (TCC) by Tony Duff are renowned for being some of the most beautiful, high-quality Tibetan fonts available. They are all in dbu can style; TCC are not planning to producedbu med fonts "until the Windows operating system can support them properly."

TCC "typefaces are available in two encoding formats: non-unicode and unicode. We continue to support our own, non-unicode format for Tibetan because, unfortunately, the Tibetan Unicode standard does not support many of the specialized characters needed for serious work in the Tibetan language."

Tibetan Computer Company fonts

The fonts of Tibetan Computer Company (TCC) by Tony Duff are renowned for being some of the most beautiful, high-quality Tibetan fonts available. They are all in dbu can style; TCC are not planning to producedbu med fonts "until the Windows operating system can support them properly."

TCC "typefaces are available in two encoding formats: non-unicode and unicode. We continue to support our own, non-unicode format for Tibetan because, unfortunately, the Tibetan Unicode standard does not support many of the specialized characters needed for serious work in the Tibetan language."

Mac OS-X Unicode fonts

Why are Mac Unicode fonts in a different section?

Unfortunately both Mac OS-X 10.5 and 10.6 (which supports Tibetan) and Adobe's programs support a different set of OpenType features which are required to correctly render Tibetan glyphs. So far Chris Fynn'sJomolhari ID font is the only publicly available font that supports all platforms. The other fonts listed above run only with Windows and Linux, and the Mac fonts below run only with Mac OS-X. See Platform Independent Tibetan Unicode Fonts for the internal encoding differences.

Legacy fonts (non-Unicode)

Why switch to Unicode?

There still exists quite a number of high quality Tibetan fonts which do not support the Unicode standard. Since they rely on proprietary encoding, they often only work in a well-defined and closed environment. That makes it difficult to work with standard software:

* For legacy fonts, standard word processors like OpenOffice or Microsoft word do not understand boundaries of Tibetan syllables and might break syllables in wrong places.

* Desktop search engines cannot search Tibetan in legacy encodings.

* It is very difficult to change fonts, special conversion software is needed.

* Files might not be readable in the future because they use proprietary encoding.